My A&I Experience

All first-years are required to take an Argument & Inquiry seminar in their first term of college. These classes are aimed to help students adjust to college writing, and are therefore reading- and writing-heavy. Since they are only for first-years, they also offer a great chance to get to know your class and make friends. There are more than thirty A&I’s to choose from, ranging from American Studies to Computer Science.

Incoming students get the list of A&I courses to choose from sometime during early summer, and then choose five of them. The registrar’s office assigns them one later in the summer. But don’t worry, you can still change it if there is a spot in the one that you want.  I, for example, got assigned Arts and Culture in the Gilded Age, but changed it to The Noun.

I honestly love my A&I. Our professor is really nice and as a class we bonded over our mutual hardship, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The Noun is basically like an introduction to linguistics course, tackling phonology, morphology and syntax. We get weekly readings and problem sets, and instead of timed exams, we have several papers. I wanted to take this course because I had always been interested in linguistics, but my high school didn’t offer a class on it. I thought this A&I could help me get experience in a field that I wasn’t previously acquainted with.

Here are some other A&I’s that might pique your interest:

Philosophy: Utopias

Music: Ways of Hearing

Computer Science: Ethics of Technology

English: How We Read

Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies: Queer and Trans Memoir

American Studies: Walt Whitman’s New York

A&I’s are really fun and they are designed for first year students to learn how college works and what is expected of them. If none of these interest you, don’t worry, there are thirty more. It really gets hard to choose among them when you’re making a list of just five.

Defne (she/her/hers), is a first year international student from Istanbul, Turkey. Her natural habitat is the library and her diet consists of tea, coffee and LDC pizza. An artistic specimen, she dabbles in all art forms from printmaking to theater. She can be observed reading comics in the bookstore in downtown Northfield.